Emphatically recommend it! Riven especially holds up.
5 Likes
Every single game cyan has ever made themselves is great, when youāre trying to escape eastern washington digitally you come up with some incredible ideas
ā¦I guess I havenāt played the Cosmic Ozmo action puzzle thing. Has anyone? Should I?
3 Likes
i started playing it like, three weeks ago? i clocked 17 hours in it but ultimately decided to stop playing today.
the game itself seemed so sparse, i couldnāt keep on going for the second half. the setting is deliciously breezy and each new area is like a two-part story in an anime (like, you know youāre in For a Real One when the episode titles have āpart oneā or āpart twoā in them), but at the same time thereās nothing particularly interesting about the setting writ large.
the combat system is so, so fun, but i felt both a lack of bosses or any real challenges that pushed it to the limits. maybe i stopped at the cusp of it, but it very much seemed like a āsolved gameā.
the game has onscreen monsters, which is nice, but the dungeon design probably the worst thing about it by far. it feels very much like an early 3D era problem, where the developers just lay down a lot of empty spaces and same-y geometry.
itās a game i could probably play an hour a day 'til the end and probably be quite happy about it, itās just that my steam library has other things that make me go "man, i wish i were trying this one out instead . . . "
7 Likes
I played a little bit of it, kind of a poke around and explore game. itās playable on Internet Archive Cosmic Osmo : Rand and Robyn Miller : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
1 Like
I believe theyāre talking about this:
2 Likes
Ayup, thatās the one!
1 Like
Whoops I like Paradise Killer.
Also played about 20 minutes of Tunic and went āOh Itās Another One Of These.ā
8 Likes
The trick with Tunic is it seems to be another one of These but:
- The manual and the impact it has on information and knowledge delivery should not be understated. Itās as if you were suddenly not only taught to jump mid-game but informed you can jump at all at that point, and it changes a lot.
- The stronger iteration of that is you will eventually realize the game is not another one of These but another one of Those. Itās really something to behold.
Paradise Killer was a much trickier proposition for me. I kept tolerating its faults because I thought the endgame would be worth it but it turned out it wasnāt, and every interesting concept it had was only half-implemented, not kept for later.
I was amazed too because I played another āopen-endedā investigation some time ago, The Painscreek Killings, and was rather flabbergasted to discover they botch one of their key concepts in exactly the same maddening way, as if thereās some secret gamedev illuminati rule to falter right at the wrong moment of such a game.
11 Likes
Finished Ratchet & Clank 2 on Vita! as I recalled, a solid upgrade over the prior game in gameplay terms, no lock strafe mode yet, but a much less punishing difficulty curve. Visually I donāt think it holds up quite as well, it ends up a lot more dark and industrial than the first game, which had a bright and lively look more generally. Plus Ratchet is in boring armour the whole time. Boo!
The Vita ports continue to be solid, though with the exception of what I think is a lack of the colour correction effects the PS2 was capable of (not too bad, I guess), and one glaring visual bug which seems to plague all three in the bundle - a flickering effect where some geometry will disappear for a frame or two at a time. Itās pretty distracting and weird, but only pops up occasionally.
Alpha effects also seem to be a problem for the Vita, so some scenes in 2 and particularly in the early levels of 3 start to dip the frame rate, itās usually when youāve just destroyed a room all at once, though, so it doesnāt detract too badly overall.
Iām still puzzled by the fact that none of the cutscenes even in 3 are properly optimised for 16:9 - Iām going to have to load this on our PS3 and see if the issue is present there, itās really weird.
4 Likes
I recall from the official Insomniac Games podcast, this decision was in direct response to the amount of furry fanart of shirtless Ratchet that came in after 1ās release. Senior art lead said something like āHe is never being shirtless againā. To my knowledge, Ratchet has never been officially shirtless again.
I think Paradise Killer is one of those where you either do or donāt resonate with the aesthetics to the degree that it overrides the shortcomings of its mystery-crafting mechanics.
2 Likes
fucking cowards
Iām so glad one of the designers of Rivet approached the situation very differently
6 Likes
Amen
1 Like
that being said the track record of female characters ever returning in later ratchet titles isā¦ not great hey
5 Likes
Is it worth expanding on that in spoiler text? I was curious if this had more going on. I started playing a little of it, until I went into a spooky house, left the spooky house, and saw a korean water ghost looking back at me from the forest. At that point I decided it was not a game I should be playing that night.
1 Like
The final boss of Deathās Door tested my patience too severely and I decided that a rage-quit was okay. I watched the ending, which was okay, and then found out there was a post-game quest to get the real ending, and I watched that too and Iām okay with not having spent the time to get that. It just gives you a (pretty weak) lore dump.
This game has itās moments! It really does. The final boss battle, though quite aggravating and demanding more perfection than I could muster, does feel suitably great. And thereās a cool payoff on some of the visual motifs that have been subtly present throughout the whole game. I appreciate that.
Overall this game manages to be better than I expected and ultimately a little disappointing. Like, the game itself raised my expectations as I was playing it and then kind of let me down.
I do have to say there was one mechanic which, if it was ever explained in-game I completely glossed over it, and it wasnāt until I looked at a walkthrough damn near the end of my playing time that I realized how to do it and thus uncover a bunch of the gameās secrets. I guess if they left it completely up to the player to figure out through experimentation, I can respect that.
1 Like
LMAO okay just ran into another uhhh defect - transparent characters are very fucked up in the PS3/Vita ports
PlayStation 2:
PlayStation 3 (Vita has the same issue):
this also shows off the significant differences in colour tone and saturation in the rendering
9 Likes
Gatting into Sable. I think this is a pretty good combination of climbing up on things, exploring things, and riding around a big open world. I did the first area to build my jet bike then did one little quest.
I think it looks pretty fantastic. I sorta stopped minding that it kind of rips off Moeibus, having read a bunch of his stuff recently, I think thereās just enough being lifted in terms of the linework and color palate. The way that the game handles level of detail so that things far away have fewer lines and then dynamically adds detail the closer you get is pretty good.
Gameplay wise this reminds me of Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus without all the dang combat, which is fine for me actually. The character movement is actually pretty decent and being able to climb/glide around, and most puzzles are just figuring out where to jump, thatās pretty good.
I think my only criticisms is Japanese Breakfast doesnāt exactly fit for me, especially vocal tracks when they kick in. Kind of hard to match music to gameplay when youāre accidentally hitting a huge rock. Their ambient stuff here works pretty well. I think iād prefer some really oldy moldy krautrock with this but, thatās just me.
I think the jetbike needed better handling. I say this as someone who did the handling for several bike based vehicles in a certain AAA game. The jetbike doesnāt feel like it has much weight to it, and rolls way too easily for something with huge wings, and bounces way too violently to give it a feeling of weight. You donāt really do skids in it and you canāt pitch it up and down over jumps. You should be able to pitch it just right over a hill and get a little speed boost, like in excitebike. ah well, if I ever make something like this, Iāll put all those things in.
anyway, itās pretty chill and I like it. so there
15 Likes
the parts in digital devil saga: avatar tuner where people shoot guns at each other are very sick. kazuma kaneko designs 5ā2" people sooo good
13 Likes
I finished two games! The first is Strange Horticulture. Itās fine. The core gameplay is all about cross referencing different clues to identify plants in your collection. Unfortunately, it wants to be a story about characters, and itās not quite achieving that. The game seemed to want me to have much more serious emotions or thoughts about the characters than I was prepared to haveāI was not able to even remember most of their names or tell them apart. At the end of the game I got a list of the fates of all the major characters in the story and some of them I could not remember the slightest bit about. The puzzles are engaging, though! I finished it, so thatās saying something, and I generally had fun. I think if the ending was less emotional I would have actually enjoyed it more.
I also finished Stray. I think the cat locomotion kind of sucksāit neither satisfies the fantasy of being a cat who can jump and gambol about freely, nor the fantasy of being a very smart mountain climby cat who can solve platforming puzzles with grace (itās usually much too hard to jump where you want to go). The actual writing often feels pretty frustrating. The game is pretty as hell though and the cat is always very cute. I loved sneaking around in the city areas and messing shit up. I guess itās also a good sign that I actually finished this game, but by the end of it I had a lot of things to shrug about and was getting pretty tired of this kind of writing:
19 Likes
oh no, this game would kill me
8 Likes